Why Cloud Security Is Essential For The Success Of The Internet Of Things

The Internet of Things has been one of the most anticipated and sought after technologies for a few years now. It is the go word in the consumer market, what with its smart phones, smart devices, and other wearables communicating with one another in order to create a single network of connected systems. Major corporations have been quick to adopt IoT devices to improve the efficiency and cost effectiveness of their devices and processes.

However, what makes IoT so interesting is the fact that it has applications in almost all fields. From government jobs like smart watering, traffic management and environment monitoring to manufacturing and healthcare sectors, the Internet of Things is a piece of technology that is applicable and can help improve upon many sectors of our society. However, this technology has some flaws in it that make it more of a threat at times.

The problems with IoT

IoT devices are being adopted at an unbelievable rate. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020 there would be 20 billion devices. This makes managing the security and privacy of these devices a challenging and arduous task for any organization. We look at some of the issues faced by early adopters of the IoT technology:

Lack of Centralized Standards

The introduction of the Internet of Things devices has been hasty to a degree. This is usually true for any emerging piece of technology because at the beginning people suffer due to the lack of proper standards, business processes, as well as best practises for the technology. All these factors make it difficult to develop a system that keeps these devices secure and reliable.

High mobility and Quantity

The fact that IoT devices are great in numbers and are constantly on the move makes them a nightmare for security professionals of companies to keep track of them and manage their assets. The other problem with the high rate of mobility of IoT devices and their sheer numbers is to roll out updates and provide maintenance.

Varied uses provide for varied targets

IoT is applicable almost everywhere, which means that almost everything can be targeted and remotely controlled or manipulated. Vehicles, nuclear power plants, and even human bodies are some of the things that can be taken control of to cause serious damage if the devices are not protected properly against the different kinds of attacks on the internet. While manipulation is one concern, data theft can also be caused due to lack of privacy protection options and protocols for such devices.

Why Cloud Security is Essential

As can be seen in the section above, there are a lot of dangers of using IoT devices. Since IoT devices store all their data on the cloud services, putting a lot of focus on cloud security is paramount for the success of IoT devices. The data stored by different devices is so much that should a hacker gain access to one of the devices and gain entry into the cloud system then he get his hands on so much more than he could imagine. There is no guarantee that this will not happen in the future, therefore a layered security approach for maintaining the security, integrity and availability of data in the IoT ecosystem is required.

The fact that most IoT devices are not physically protected and they are not at all tamper proof, the onus is on cloud security to ensure that all the data on the cloud is not compromised. It should be able to detect compromised devices early to minimise the damage.

Sound cryptographic methods should be used to authenticate and authorize all the devices controlled by the cloud management system. DNS firewalls and other strategies should be used to detect compromised devices and prevent attacks like DoS from happening.

Conclusion

We saw in this article why IoT devices have a long way to go before being adopted by all companies of the world and why cloud security is essential for their success. As of now there is no centralized standard for IoT devices so ensuring the security of all devices is not possible by the devices themselves. Cloud security is, therefore, the only way to go about securing IoT for now, developing a good base for the future.